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Have they mentioned what video editing and CD/DVD/BD burning programs are supposed to do with their multi-GB temporary files after the switch? Where are we supposed to render our movies and build our ISOs?

I have a laptop running Fedora 16 with /tmp and /var/tmp as tmpfs (picked up the idea from Gentoo) with 16GB RAM and a netbook running fedora 16, which has 4GB RAM and never had any problems on both.

Why should applications keep tempfiles over boot? I personally hate session managers for example...
Why should the memory not being used for something useful on the laptop? Most of the time it only uses only like 1-2GB of memory, except if I use mencoder or something in /tmp.
With SSD in both, I have no swap partition/file either
My firefox saves temporary internet files to /tmp as well

So, I use /tmp for all the rubbish, the system is like a virgin after each reboot

We are not using Windows. Linux isn't going to start banging on your swap partition without good reason. If you have it and don't need it then it won't get used. If you don't have it and you need it then processes will just start crashing.

I'll take a more fault tolerant and resilient Linux system over saving a few GB of disk space.

Starting with version 2.6 Linux is a lot more swap-happy then it used to be, but even on a SSD some swap and a lower value for /proc/sys/vm/swappiness is preferable to no swap at all.

As for the tmpfs being to small for whatever big files you need to store there, by default each tmpfs will be created with the size of half the RAM size. But this can be overridden for each mount point using the size=XX option. For example, on my home desktop I have /var/tmp/portage as a tmpfs mounted with size=8G even though it only has 4GB of RAM. And I didn't find yet a package that requires more than 8GB to build. Though I don't use libreoffice or chrome. Just make sure you have plenty of swap space for when those tmpfs start filling up.

And mounting the entire /var/tmp as tmpfs should not cause any functional problems, as any application creating a temporary file, no matter if it's in /tmp or /var/tmp should not assume it will be able to reopen it after it closed the original file descriptor, but it might cause performance problems, like making KDE start slower because it has to recreate its /var/tmp/kdecache-<username> directory.

It's not really a big deal if your individual user configuration uses tmpfs, but it's a big deal for huge (general purpose) distros. They have to take into account the amount of RAM their users have and maybe change their minimum spec requirements (could cause outrage). And even if we can assume that all users have 6Gb of RAM, we'll still have to consider their workloads. For example, I have /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs, but neither libreoffice nor chromium will compile because they're so huge. Granted, the portage problem is easily fixed, but this is Gentoo, and it's meant to be tweaked heavily.

The other distros don't have it so easy. They must "please everyone" or die trying.

unlike ramdisk tempfs can be shoved into swap. Also if you put more than a couple of mb into /tmp you are in trouble anyway. Because storing so much data in a partition that is supposed to be wiped on reboot just asks for problems.

/tmp as tempfs is sensible. /var/tmp is at least worthy of consideration. /var/tmp/portage with 8gb of ram really a good thing - and more than enough to compile chromium or lo. Which I do. A lot.

Have they mentioned what video editing and CD/DVD/BD burning programs are supposed to do with their multi-GB temporary files after the switch? Where are we supposed to render our movies and build our ISOs?